The Vatican

What’s in a name? If you’re the Pope, quite a lot.

With 2,000-years of history, the incoming Bishop of Rome is able to choose a name from among his 266 predecessors whose career best reflects his values.

American-born Robert Prevost has chosen to be known as Pope Leo XIV. This is an important nod to Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903 and is generally regarded as the father of modern Catholic social teaching. He called for the church to address social and economic issues, and emphasized the dignity of individuals, the common good, community, and taking care of marginalized individuals.

In the midst of the Gilded Age, Leo XIII defended the rights of workers and said that the church had not just the duty to speak about justice and fairness, but also the responsibility to make sure that such equities were accomplished.

Prevost’s choice of the name Leo invokes the principles of both Leo XIII and his immediate predecessor, Pope Francis. In his own lifetime he has aligned himself with many of Francis’s social reforms, and his election appears to be a rejection of hard-line right-wing Catholics in the U.S. and elsewhere who have used their religion to support far-right politics.

Leading the American pack as a self-appointed moral arbiter of the Catholic community is Vice-President JD Vance. Shortly after taking office in January, Vance began to talk of the concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love.” He claimed it justified the MAGA emphasis on family and tribalism and the mass expulsion of migrants.

Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after all that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

The Pope’s job is to be a moral arbiter and interpreter of Christian doctrine. Much more so than that of any politician, all of whose morals are generally regarded as suspect. On February 10, Pope Francis responded to Vance in a letter to American bishops. He said the vice president was wrong.  “Christians,” wrote the Pope, “know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

“Worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth,” Pope Francis wrote.

He acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but he defended the fundamental dignity of every human being and the fundamental rights of migrants, noting that the “rightly formed conscience” would disagree with any program that “identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He continued: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”

The next day, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who described himself as “a lifelong Catholic,” told reporters at the White House, “I’ve got harsh words for the Pope…. He ought to fix the Catholic Church, concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”

As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV has the power to present himself as a moral alternative to MAGA in the same way as Polish-born Pope John Paul II countered the Soviet empire. He has already re-tweeted Pope Francis’s criticisms of Vance. This would explain the furious response to the new pope by the MAGA crowd. Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer close to the ear of Donald Trump, Pope Leo, wrote “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “open borders globalist installed to counter Trump.” Kirk is probably right. Is that such a bad thing?